


The Usurper

by variative



Category: A Closer Walk With Thee (2017)
Genre: Christianity, Forgiveness, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Other, Rape, or lack thereof
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 09:19:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19827133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/variative/pseuds/variative
Summary: Elijah’s eyes twitched open. “I forgive you,” he mumbled.“Don’t say that again or I’ll hurt you,” the demon said, kissing the side of Elijah’s head. “I don’t accept it.”





	The Usurper

**Author's Note:**

> this an fucked up awful piece of work for a film that made me say what the fuck, that was awful

The demon struck Elijah in the head with the butt of the machete, and he fell unconscious to the floor.

“Elijah, Elijah,” it sang to itself. It put the blade of the machete to his throat, took it away and hauled the priest upright. Rage and loathing roiled in the gut of an old body filled with new hunger. There was so much work to be done.

~

“Accept my love,” the demon told Elijah. It stroked Elijah’s chest, water streaming away red from under its fingers. “Accept my love. There is no one else.”

“My only love…” Elijah slurred. “Is…”

The demon put its hand on Elijah’s jaw and closed his mouth, lolling his head back on the demon’s shoulder. He was so ill and damaged that barely a touch was enough to still his voice.

“Don’t say that name,” the demon whispered. “Not in here, Elijah.” It cupped water in its hand against Elijah’s cheek and rinsed the blood away, up to the hot swollen gash on his temple that still bled a little, clotted and sluggish, and then down to where traces still clung to his jaw and neck. “All clean,” the demon hummed, and kissed Elijah’s hair. “But not all better yet, hm?”

The demon sang fetid songs in forgotten barbarous tongues, sang Elijah the psalms, caressed him and licked the shell of his ear and whispered seven times, “There is no Pit.” It kept Elijah under the shower for a long time, until the water ran cold, and then until the sky outside was the deepest, purest blue of evening, and Elijah’s lips were aiming to match the hue and he was shivering in violent convulsions. Only then did the demon lift itself up and Elijah staggering after, and brought him to the bed and wrapped him in blankets.

“I killed them,” the demon whispered. It lay himself out across Elijah’s body, bracing its weight up off him but their chests close enough to rest against each other, and put the words in his ear. Elijah twitched and shuddered. The demon’s breath was hot and dry, a desert wind to Elijah’s chilled body. “While you sang your holy songs and practiced your rituals of Godly cleanliness I slaughtered them. I killed your beautiful girl and I killed the man who would have raped her before your eyes. But I didn’t kill your Jordan and I didn’t kill you.”

Elijah’s eyes twitched open. “I forgive you,” he mumbled.

“Don’t say that again or I’ll hurt you,” the demon said, kissing the side of Elijah’s head. “I don’t accept it.”

~

When Elijah woke the demon was reading from Deuteronomy, about how Moses would die in the desert, never cross the river, never reached that good hill country which had been promised to him. Elijah shifted and moaned, waking slowly and painfully, and the demon set the book facedown so it wouldn’t lose the page and then leaned over and kissed Elijah softly on the mouth. He couldn’t resist, and insensate with sleep as he was, he even moved to kiss the demon in return for a moment until he woke fully and startled back.

“Get off me,” he snarled, thrashing, but the demon pinned him down and grasped his face in its hands and forced Elijah’s mouth back to its own. It held Elijah in a long kiss, but Elijah never stopped fighting it, his body tense as iron beneath the demon until at last he was released to go scrambling away, stumbling hard into the wall.

“Don’t fight me, Elijah,” the demon said, crouched on the bed. “You created me with the boy and the redheaded bitch. You are my father. You are my slave.”

“What are you saying?” Elijah trembled and sobbed for a moment, and then he dove across the room for the crucifix, and the demon sprang after him. They collided hard, and the demon seized Elijah by the hair and dragged him shouting and thrashing from the room.

The kitchen was loud with buzzing flies, heavy with the stench of drying blood. The bodies had not yet begun to putrefy, but it was overwhelming for the humans: Elijah retched and sobbed in horror, clinging to the demon’s waist to stay upright with its grip on his hair, and the demon too felt its stomach lurch. “Look at what you did,” it said, kicking the fat man’s arm. “All because of your cowardice and sin, Elijah. You killed them for your evil pride.” Its stomach heaved and it forced Elijah’s face upturned and spat down into his open eye.

“Liar,” Elijah cried in a hoarse, pitiful voice. “Liar, liar! You’re the evil, you’re the demon! Oh, God, Lindsey—!”

It struck him across the face. “It was you who brought them here,” it told him coldly. “You who seduced Ascension to her fate at this one’s hands.” It kicked the fat man again, the hard slap of its bare foot hitting flesh ringing through the room. “It was the whore who opened the way to me. It was you who made me kill her. It was you.”

It hauled him up and embraced him tight against its chest. “Beautiful Elijah,” it whispered, turning him from the bodies. “The boy would have loved you, but you made it cruel.”

“In-in the name of the Father—” Elijah stammered, barely a plea, much the less a command. “In the—the n-name—!”

“I think I want to show you what you could have had if you’d only given in,” the demon said, clenching its fist in Elijah’s hair. It pulled him away, down the hall to the bathroom, and Elijah gave a shout of horror and fought it every step of the way. “You’ll be less forgiving of me after this, I think,” the demon told him, dragging him along. It kicked the door shut and forced Elijah’s head down into the sink.

“Jordan,” Elijah was sobbing, “Jordan, _please._ Help me, Jordan, please, _please!”_

“Poor Jordan,” it said, stroking Elijah’s back with its free hand, as comforting a gesture as it could make. “He would if he were able, you know.” It bowed and kissed Elijah’s neck, and pressed close so that their bodies aligned as intimately as possible. It reached down and wrapped its hand around Elijah’s cock hanging soft and small between his legs, drawing a fearful moan from him. “He never wanted this. It was so hard to make him submit, but in the end I did it. You fed me so well, Elijah, and I grew so strong.” It kissed him again, hungry wet kisses along his hairline, down the line of his throat. Elijah shuddered and cringed; his cock grew turgid.

“There’s Vaseline in the cabinet,” it murmured to him. “It wouldn’t be like the first time. I’d be gentle with you. I’d make you enjoy it. Think of it as honoring the last wish he had, before you made him hate you with a godless hate and fear you with a godless fear.”

Elijah whimpered and thrashed, weakly. “He would have forgiven you for it,” the demon whispered, and did, then, reach up and open the medicine cabinet. “But I don’t.”

The demon made the second rape last a long time, slick and easy, not at all like the first. When it was done Elijah staggered away looking shell-shocked and hollow; his face was streaked with tears and snot. No words of forgiveness came from his pretty throat. No pious grace eased his countenance.

The demon crowded him up against the door before he could get away. “It was a present from me to him. Did you like it?”

Elijah’s mouth struggled and wavered around the words of the exorcism.

“Don’t lie to me,” the demon said, “or I’ll do it again.”

“No,” Elijah whispered. “No. You’re evil. It was evil.”

“That's your fault. It was almost love,” the demon said. “It was almost innocent.”

~

“Go and dress,” the demon told the priest, once it let him out of the bathroom. He had to move past it down the hallway, limping a little. The demon groped him as he shuffled past, and cackled and leered at Elijah’s expression of fresh violation. He scurried into the bedroom and slammed the door. There was no movement in the house, other than the demon and the flies, for many hours.

The demon returned to the bathroom after the blood and bodies were gone from the kitchen and examined its cheek in the mirror. Salt tears overflowed and ran down into the cuts as it watched, stinging like a shock, and its breath came fast. “Oh, little one,” it whispered, embracing itself and rocking back and forth, watching its own mutilated and tear-streaked face. “Look what they did to us. Look how he hurt us, and was afraid.” It licked its teeth and it let its eyes roll. “We gave him reason now.”

Past the thin wall in the bedroom, it could hear Elijah’s muffled sobs.

“Just make this stop,” Elijah whispered later. “Please. Just end this.”

The demon caressed his hair. “How much of the flesh of your body would match the weight of the soul you cost him?” 

“Jordan was suffering because of you,” Elijah insisted, weak as he was. “I tried to help him.”

“You did this to him,” the demon corrected the priest. “You made me and I grew and grew, uglier and hungrier, until I ate him up inside himself.” It leaned down and kissed Elijah deeply, its tongue pressing inside his slack and yielding mouth. “It will not be over for a long time.”

~

“What is your name, demon?” Elijah demanded, clutching the heavy cross.

“Whatever you want it to be,” the demon replied.

~

On the third night the demon woke screaming.

Waking rang through it like the strike upon a bell and it swallowed the noise that wanted to tear once more from its throat, heaved for breath and stared wildly, shuddering, cold with its body’s own sweat. The room resolved slowly in the dark, to its human senses: the walls, the windows, the doors. Elijah rising, disoriented, from his own uneasy slumber on the floor at the foot of the bed. He would take no comfort from the demon willingly.

They stared at each other for a long moment, the faint inconsequential noises of the room enormous in the demon’s ears: its own harsh breathing, and Elijah’s, and the insects outside, and the bodies rotting under the backyard, and the pipes shifting inside the walls.

“What do demons dream of?” Elijah asked.

“Hell,” the demon replied, touching its mouth.

“There’s no such thing,” Elijah said, repeating the demon’s words back to it with bleary delirious humor. 

“No,” the demon hissed out slowly. Images lingered in its mind of the dark-haired girl—Kara. Glimpses and flashes, fear and selfishness. Pale skin, a slender frame, pity and nervous kindness and the hideous shame it had brought the boy, the terrible longing worse than the shame. It put its fingers in its mouth.

“I have a terrible thing to tell you,” it said to Elijah, wriggling its hand down. Elijah breathed hard and unsteady, but remained, listening helplessly. “I didn’t take him, in the end” it said, gasped and shivered and pushed deeper. “He let me have himself.”

Elijah’s face was hidden in his hand, recoiling from the demon and its activities, but at its words his hand clenched into a fist. His voice was small but lucid and resolute. “Jordan was like a brother to me. He was a good man and Christ was with him. He would never have succumbed to you.”

“Wasn’t,” the demon sneered, corrected, “Isn’t. He’s not dead, Elijah. He’s right here. He’s right here, and Christ isn’t with him, we are. _Oh…_ oh, he didn’t want to, Elijah, beautiful Elijah the prophet, whose words came true. I was grinding him down, true, Elijah, but you, Elijah–”

“ _Stop saying my name,_ ” Elijah snarled. He was trembling, hand fisting in his hair, shrinking against the wall.

“—he was too afraid of you,” the demon went on, moaning the words, panting. “He really believed it. He really thought he was evil, but he’s not a saint, Elijah, his Christian nature just didn’t stand up to how afraid he was of you, Elijah, of you and how you hurt him and made him low and wretched, and it was then in the endless night of his horror that I came to him from the wellspring of his soul and I said I would be the scapegoat and bear the weight of his sins, Elijah, I did, and he threw himself upon me saying, _yes, anything,_ _just let me out,_ and I did!” Its eyes rolled and it jerked upright and fixed its gaze on the priest. It pulled its fingers out of itself, breathing deep in steady rasping gulps.

“Get up now,” it snarled in a dog-voice, dead-voice. Elijah didn’t, at first, so the demon made him crawl to its bed.

“Easy now,” it told him once they were getting to the meat of things, low this time with human pleasure. A small trembling noise emanated from the depths of Elijah’s throat. The demon stroked his head and kissed his cheek. “He would have loved you so beautifully, Elijah,” it whispered, a confession. “Can you feel it?”

Elijah moaned again and shuddered forward, panting too high and too fast.

“I can imagine it perfectly,” it went on. “How he would have blushed for you, and trembled when you kissed him, and how his care for you would have grown to an enormous proportion too large for any reasonable heart, and been as pure and vital as spring-water, the joy he would have felt, the pleasure. I can almost…” it licked at Elijah’s mouth. “…taste the sweetness.”

He jerked his face away; the demon wriggled underneath him, opening its body, and he slid deep. They groaned together, the demon grinning ear to ear. The cross carved into its cheek split open and began to bleed.

“You took it away from him, but it’s alright. We can pretend; you’re doing such good work, Elijah,” it said. It put its mouth to his neck and ran its hands over his back, slow and reverential. “Now fuck me like you love him.”

It was good, better than the demon knew how to long for, as good as it knew to rage in its absence. At some point Elijah put his head down in the crook of the demon’s neck and wrapped his arms around it and held their bodies together. His thrusts were long and deliberate. At first the demon could taste his fear, but after a time the scent faded underneath the smell of lust and salt, and by that time the demon was scarcely thinking at all, least of all what the priest smelled like, except for hot and male and carnal, his sweat heavy on the demon’s tongue.

“Oh my goodness, Eli,” the demon panted, clutching at Elijah’s shoulders. “Oh my gosh. Oh my _gosh._ ” 

Elijah groaned and fucked him harder, and held him tighter.

“Eli,” he said, over and over. “Eli, Eli, _Eli…”_

It wasn’t the demon’s fault, but in a way it was sorry. Tears ran from its eyes and rage burned in its heart as it thought of the horrible thing it had been made, the shame when there wanted love, the fear when there wanted safety, the terrible where there wanted innocence.

“Dear God,” the demon said pensively, afterward. Its hand was in Elijah’s hair, forcing his head down hard against its chest. Its fingers splayed over the curve of Elijah's skull, over delicate heat not long for God's green earth. “What a terrible thing to do to a person.”

In the morning, it decided, it would flee.

**Author's Note:**

> i mean... it's not worse than the film itself?


End file.
